A few weekends ago, I saw No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, at my local theater. It’s not an exaggeration to say I’ve been thinking about it constantly ever since. (I reviewed the film on YouTube. You can watch that here if you’re into that sort of thing.)

There are many images from the film that have remained stuck in my head: Bulldozers crushing a Palestinian school; Israeli troops assaulting one of the filmmakers; and quiet moments of peace in which the people of the West Bank continue to live their lives, despite the constant threat of repressive violence. These are deeply emotional scenes in one way or another — notable for their jagged brutality or fragile-yet-beautiful tranquility.

But there’s one scene in particular that doesn’t fit neatly into either category, and I’ve been thinking about it more than almost any other. Early in the film, an Israeli man arrives in Masafer Yatta, the village that’s at the center of the documentary. His name is Ilan, and we’re told that he was appointed by the Israeli military to carry out a court order to expel Palestinians from the land. Ilan isn’t a solider, or at least he isn’t dressed as one. He’s a bureaucrat. His tools are procedure and paperwork, and that’s precisely what he uses against the people of Masafer Yatta. As Palestinians plead with him and yell at him, Ilan walks through the village, leaving printed demolition orders in his wake.

The scene is awful, yet suffused with a sense of absurdity. Ilan tapes a demolition order to a playground fence. He hands one to a dumbfounded family. He places another in the ruins of a house that has clearly been demolished already. It’s an exercise in bureaucratic box-checking: But to what end?

What makes the scene ludicrous is the superfluousness of the demolition orders. Heavily armed Israeli troops are everywhere; the threat of violence is palpable. Yet these pieces of paper are treated as deeply necessary, as though delivering them justifies the razing of a swing set and a children’s slide. The Israeli state is playing a game of make-believe in which the demolition order itself holds the power to evict people from their homes, not the soldiers standing six feet away. The law — or more specifically, the insistence on following a symbolic procedure — gives institutional license and imprimatur to what would otherwise be an act of naked aggression. A piece of paper cannot erase the violence, but it can obfuscate its true nature. The victims are not fooled, and neither is the camera. But it gives the perpetrators a reason to believe their actions are morally legitimate, rather than barbaric.

I was reminded of a passage from Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which I’m currently reading. As a book about the rise of Silicon Valley’s dominant business model of data extraction and digital conquest, it may not seem immediately applicable to the events of No Other Land. But give me a moment, I promise I’ll make a connection that makes sense.

When discussing Google’s dubious innovations in the art of data harvesting, Zuboff explores what she calls “conquest by declaration,” or the institutionalized use of edicts to justify the collection and exploitation of what should be private data. As part of this analysis, she talks about the Spanish conquest of indigenous Americans in the late fifteenth century. The Europeans, Zuboff tells us, relied heavily on “the invention of legalistic measures to provide the invasion with a gloss of justification,” hiding their atrocities behind the veneer procedural authority.

She explains:

The Spanish conquerors and their monarchs were eager to justify their invasion as one way to induce agreement, especially among their European audience. They developed measures intended to impart “a legalistic veneer by citing and following approved precedents.” To this end the soldiers were tasked with reading the Monarchical Edict of 1513 known as the Requirimiento to indigenous villagers before attacking them. The edict declared that the authority of God, the pope, and the king was embodied in the conquistadors and then declared the native peoples as vassals subordinate to that authority: “You Cacics and Indians of this Continent.… We declare or be it known to you all, that there is but one God, one hope, and one King of Castile, who is Lord of these Countries; appear forth without delay, and take the oath of Allegiance to the Spanish King, as his Vassals.”

The edict went on to enumerate the sufferings that would befall the villagers if they failed to comply. In this world-shattering confrontation with the unprecedented, the native people were summoned, advised, and forewarned in a language they could not fathom to surrender without resistance in recognition of authorities they could not conceive. The exercise was so cynical and cruel that the approaching invaders often dispatched their obligation by mumbling the edict’s long paragraphs into their beards in the dead of night as they hid among the thick vegetation waiting to pounce: “Once the Europeans had discharged their duty to inform, the way was clear for pillage and enslavement.”

Zuboff, of course, uses this history to make a point about present day tech companies; her comparison is thematic, rather than literal. (Google is using declarative edicts to steal data, not physical land.) Yet I’m sure you see the obvious parallel with the events of No Other Land. There is a bleak similarity here, a legacy of colonial violence that stretches unbroken across 500 years of history. The cynicism of conquistadors hiding in bushes has been replaced with the absurdity of a demolition order placed amid rubble — an order issued by a court in which the Palestinians have no meaningful voice or representation. The methods may have changed, but only superficially. The cruel essence remains.